Jane is ten. She is an orphan. She has been living for the past six years as a dependent in the house of her dead uncle's widow — her Aunt Reed — who hates her, and with three cousins — John, Eliza, Georgiana — who variously hate and ignore her. It is a winter afternoon. She has been reading in a window seat behind a curtain. Her cousin John, who is fourteen, finds her there, accuses her of reading his books, and throws the book at her head. She bleeds. She flies at him. The servants come. Jane is blamed for the fight she did not start. Her aunt has her locked, as a punishment, in the red room.

The red room is the novel's first great image. It is the bedroom in which her uncle — the one adult in the house who had loved her — died nine years ago. It has been kept more or less as it was then: heavy red damask curtains, a great dark bed, a cheval glass in the corner, everything in it slightly too large for a child and slightly too old. No one sleeps in it. No one goes into it except the housekeeper, once a week, to dust.

Jane is locked in. The door is turned on her. She is left alone. It is getting dark. The furniture, in the half-light, grows ominous. She looks into the cheval glass. She sees a small, white, thin-faced child with great dark eyes looking back at her, and for a long strange moment she does not recognize the reflection as herself. She is frightened. She begins to believe that her dead uncle's spirit is in the room. She sees — or thinks she sees — a light move along the wall. She screams. She falls to the floor. She is not quite in her body any more.

The servants, hearing her scream, come and open the door. Her aunt tells them to push her back in, and the key is turned on her again. It is the moment Charlotte Brontë's later nineteenth-century readers most frequently wrote about when they wrote to her: the moment the novel's quiet heroine has, in their words, a fit. Jane is carried out, hours later, unconscious. She is ill for days afterward.

The chapter is already doing everything the novel will go on doing. A powerless child is shut into a room by someone who legally owns her comfort and her food and is then, when her powerlessness produces a response, punished further for the response. The book, in 1847, is going to be the first English novel to argue out loud that a child thus treated has not been disciplined but injured, and that the injury will be visible on the adult who results. Every subsequent decision of the heroine's adult life — the refusal of Rochester's first proposal of life as his mistress, the refusal of St John's later proposal of life as his missionary wife — will be made by a person who, at ten, was locked in a red room with her own face in a mirror and her own self no longer quite in her body.

Jane is sent away to Lowood, a charity school for the daughters of the poor clergy. Lowood is modelled, closely and angrily, on the Cowan Bridge School to which Charlotte Brontë herself was sent with her four sisters, two of whom died of the tuberculosis that the cold damp school did nothing to prevent. Mr Brocklehurst, the director, is a cartoon of Evangelical hypocrisy: he requires the schoolgirls to live on burned porridge and Spartan wear while his own daughters, visiting, wear velvet and silk. The food is worse than poor. The rooms are cold. The linen is thin. The teachers, except for one, are indifferent. Jane, on her first day, is singled out by Brocklehurst as a liar, on the basis of a lie told about her by her aunt, and is stood on a stool in front of the school for a day.

Into this world walks Helen Burns. Helen is thirteen. She is very thin. She is very clever. She has been, since she arrived at Lowood, the teachers' favourite target for small cruelties — her seam is crooked, her nails are not clean, her posture is not straight — all of which Helen accepts without complaint. She has, somehow, arrived at a Christian patience that is not a pose. She really does love the people who punish her. She really does think they have reasons they do not understand themselves. She bears it all.

Jane, freshly arrived from Gateshead with a ten-year-old's scalded fury at injustice, cannot believe it. She tries, in the evenings, to argue Helen out of her patience. She asks: why do you not hit Miss Scatcherd back when she strikes you with the cane. Why do you not at least complain. Helen answers calmly, from her book of Seneca, from her New Testament, from her own long-developed theology: because the injustice is not the whole of the world. Because one's own soul is not reachable by an external cane. Because if we bear patiently we will be, in the hereafter, more ourselves than we were. Jane does not accept the argument. She stores it.

Helen dies, that spring, of the consumption that runs through the school like a slow current in the bedding. She dies at night. Jane, having sneaked into her bed to be with her, is the last person to hold her. Helen is cheerful to the end. She says: I am very happy. I am going to my father. Jane is left in the dormitory at dawn with her friend's body beside her and with a quiet that will stay with her for the rest of her life.

The book goes on, and Jane grows up at Lowood — the school is investigated, Brocklehurst is demoted, conditions improve, Jane stays on as a teacher. But the person Jane goes on as, for the rest of the novel, is a person who has, at ten years old, been given a friend like Helen and has lost her. Everything Jane learns about how to carry an injustice without being destroyed by it, she learns in the schoolyard at Lowood from a thirteen-year-old girl who quoted Marcus Aurelius over her mended stockings.

Jane has left Lowood. She has advertised for a position. She has been hired as a governess at Thornfield Hall, a handsome country manor in the north of England, to teach one pupil — a little French girl named Adèle, whose mother was an opera dancer and whose father, the owner of Thornfield, is usually abroad. Jane has been at Thornfield for three months. She has not met the owner. She has met the housekeeper, Mrs Fairfax. She has met the French child. She has explored the house, including, on her first tour, the third floor, where she has heard, behind one locked door, an odd sound she could not quite place.

One January evening Jane walks into the nearby village to post a letter. It is a frozen bright moonlit evening, six miles to the village and six back. On her way home, a great black Newfoundland dog comes flying past her in the lane. A moment later, a horse and a man come clattering up behind it. The horse slips on a sheet of ice. The man is thrown. He curses with feeling. Jane — who has been taught all her life to keep out of other people's business and does not — walks over and, in the plainest language, asks whether she can help.

This is how the novel stages its most important meeting. Mr Rochester does not arrive at Thornfield in a carriage with a great entrance. He arrives on his back in the mud, with a sprained ankle, shouting at his horse, in the dark. Jane — who has no way of knowing who he is — treats him exactly as she would treat any stranger of middle age with a sprained ankle on a country road. She offers him her shoulder. He leans on it. She helps him to his horse. He rides on to the house ahead of her. She walks home.

She finds, an hour later, that the stranger is her employer. He is sitting in the library with his ankle on a stool. He is not handsome. He is not tall. He is a dark, thick-browed, middle-aged man with a heavy brow and a bad temper. He is also — though she will take some weeks to notice it — exactly the sort of man Jane Eyre will find it impossible to be polite to and possible to be honest with.

Their first evenings at Thornfield are the novel's gift to the reader. Rochester does not flatter her. He does not even speak to her with the deference an employer of 1847 would owe to even a plain governess. He quizzes her. He cross-examines her. He asks her whether she thinks him handsome. She answers, calmly, no. He asks her whether she plays. She plays, badly. He asks her if she has drawn. She has. She fetches her portfolio. He pages through it — three portraits of dreams, a drowned corpse, a glacier — and looks up. He says: where did you see these things. She says: I did not see them. I dreamed them. He is quiet. He is thinking that the small plain governess he has just met is a genuine oddity. She is thinking the same about him. The book is set in motion by two unhandsome difficult people paying each other, on a January evening in front of a library fire, the rarest compliment either has yet received: the compliment of being taken seriously.

Months have passed. Jane and Rochester have fallen into a set of habits a reader does not need to be told are a love affair. They walk together after dinner in the orchard. They argue. They read poems aloud. They tease each other. Jane, who has never before in her life had the attention of a man who was not telling her what to do, is quietly altering inside her plain governess dresses. Rochester — a man who has had many women, none of whom has liked him as he actually is — is discovering that being liked for one's actual self is an experience for which his thirty-eight previous years have not prepared him.

And then a guest is expected — a Miss Blanche Ingram, a titled, tall, beautiful, spectacular young society woman, exactly the sort of wife Mr Rochester is expected by his neighbourhood to choose. Blanche comes. Blanche is installed. Blanche is impossible to Jane, charming to Rochester. Rochester, in what Jane cannot yet see is a game, makes every appearance of being about to marry Blanche. Jane watches this, miserable, convinced she has misread the months of intimacy, steeling herself to leave Thornfield when the engagement is announced.

One evening Rochester asks her to walk with him in the orchard. It is early summer. The chestnut tree in the middle of the walled orchard is in flower. He tells her, in a voice that is careful in a way she has never heard before, that he has found her a new position. A family in Ireland has engaged her as governess. She must leave in a week. Jane — who has been holding herself together for three months on the assumption that she could at least keep seeing his face across the dining table — breaks.

She delivers the speech that made Jane Eyre, in 1847, a book that young women copied by hand into their diaries. She says: do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless. She says: I have as much soul as you — and full as much heart. She says: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet equal — as we are. This is the English novel saying out loud, for perhaps the first time, that a poor plain woman's love is the exact moral equivalent of a rich handsome man's love, and that if they do not see each other as equals on earth they will in any case see each other as equals in heaven, and why wait.

Rochester, in a state of some excitement, tells her that he has no intention of marrying Blanche, that he wants Jane herself, that she is to be his wife. Jane, stunned, accepts. They kiss in the orchard. The summer wind gets up. The next morning, walking through the orchard, they see that the chestnut tree under which they stood has been struck, during the night, by lightning, and split down its centre, each half still alive but leaning away from the other. Charlotte Brontë — who rarely gives a reader such plain warning — has marked the engagement with the novel's grimmest piece of symbolism. A marriage made at the foot of a tree that the sky has already split is not going to go well.

The wedding morning. Jane has come down the stairs in her travelling dress. Rochester has been impatient all week. They have walked to the village church together. The service has begun. The clergyman has asked — with the usual formula — whether any person here present knew of any impediment.

A man in the back of the church steps forward. He is a lawyer, from London. He has an affidavit. He reads it aloud: Edward Fairfax Rochester of Thornfield Hall is, by a marriage at Spanish Town, Jamaica, on the 20th of October, fifteen years ago, already the husband of a woman named Bertha Antoinetta Mason. That woman is still living. The marriage cannot therefore proceed.

Rochester, in a voice that his household has never heard before, admits it. He takes them all — the clergyman, the lawyer, Jane, Mason (who is Bertha's brother) — back to Thornfield. He opens the door to the third floor. He opens a door that Jane has never been allowed through. In a locked room, in the care of a hard-faced keeper named Grace Poole who has been going in and out of it for a decade, is a woman. She is tall. She is strong. She is dark. She is insane. Her hair is matted. She is, Rochester says to them all with a shrug that is horrifying and also sincere, his wife.

Bertha Mason rushes at Rochester. He holds her off. The keeper subdues her. Rochester turns to the wedding party and says, with a weariness that is almost courteous: this is what I have. This is what I have been trying to put behind me. Look at her. Then look at Jane. And then look at me and tell me you do not understand.

And Jane — who has been silent, who has not even cried, who has been watching — knows by the time they leave the third floor that she is going to have to go.

This is the moment by which the book is most remembered and most argued about. A mad wife in the attic. Rochester has been, for fifteen years, the legal husband of a woman he keeps, for money's sake and to protect the family name, in a locked room in his own house. He has not gone back to Jamaica, where she was born, to divorce her — divorce was, in 1847, effectively impossible without an act of Parliament — and has not killed her, and has not formally admitted her existence. He has built his life on pretending she did not exist. And he has asked Jane to marry him while knowing, every day of the courtship, what was on the third floor.

The novel gives Jane, that evening, the choice that every Victorian heroine before her had been spared. Rochester, in her bedroom, on his knees, begs her to stay. He offers her life with him — not as wife, since he already has one, but as beloved — anywhere in Europe. He will take her. He will protect her. He will keep her in luxury. She loves him. She wants to stay. She almost stays.

And she says no. She says no because if she stays she will have accepted that her own worth as a person is smaller than her happiness, and the red-room child in her, and the Lowood friend in her, and the orchard speaker in her, will not accept it. She gets up before dawn. She packs nothing. She walks out of the house with four shillings and a small bundle. She walks until she is picked up, half-dead of exposure, at the door of a parsonage on the moors.

Jane has been, for over a year, at a small Yorkshire parish. She has been rescued, half-dead, by a clergyman named St John Rivers and his two sisters. She has been given work as a village schoolmistress. She has discovered, by a coincidence the novel permits itself, that she is the Rivers' first cousin, that an uncle of hers has died and left her a small fortune, and that she is finally, at twenty-one, a woman of independent means.

St John is a good man and a cold one. He has set his heart on being a missionary in India. He has asked Jane to marry him and come with him. The marriage is, he makes clear, not to be a marriage of love. Love is a distraction. Jane is strong, she is intelligent, she has her own money, she is a Christian, she can learn Hindi. She will make an excellent missionary wife. He tells her this in a voice she has come to respect and not to love. He tells her that romantic love is a lower good, and that God's work is the higher one, and that she will regret — forever — having refused the higher.

Jane hesitates. She is tired. She is lonely. She has not heard from Rochester in a year. She does not know if he is alive. She has her principles but she is only twenty-one and she is, against her own will, very close to saying yes. She has begun, under the long pressure of St John's gentle bullying, to believe that this is the shape her life is meant to take.

They stand together one evening in the parsonage. He asks her for the last time. He stands very close. He puts his hand on her head. He says: decide. Jane begins to frame the words of acceptance.

And then, in what the novel offers without embarrassment as a real event in its own world, Jane hears — clearly, physically, on the air — a voice calling her name. Jane! Jane! Jane! Three times. It is Rochester's voice. She does not imagine it. It is not a dream. She hears it as if he were outside the window. She says aloud: I am coming. She pulls back from St John. The spell of his influence, which has been gathering for months, snaps.

The next morning she leaves. She takes the coach to Thornfield. She arrives to find the Hall a blackened ruin — burned down, she learns at the inn, six months ago, by the mad wife, who had set her own bed on fire and then, on the roof, fallen to her death when her husband was trying to save her. Rochester, she is told, is blind. He lost one hand in the fire. He is alive, at a small shuttered house called Ferndean, thirty miles further on.

The voice on the moor is, on one reading, the only strictly supernatural event in the book. On another, it is the book's final metaphor for something Jane has earned: the ability to hear, in the right moment, what her own soul is telling her. She has held out long enough — against aunt, against headmaster, against employer, against the best and coldest clergyman of her life — that when the critical moment comes, the voice that breaks through St John's grip is audible. The novel is very careful with the event. It does not explain it. It simply has it happen, and Jane acts on it, and by the time the book ends Rochester has told her that on the same evening, at the same hour, a hundred miles away, he had been calling her name out loud into the garden at Ferndean.

Ferndean is a small dark manor in a damp wood, thirty miles from Thornfield. Rochester has been living there alone with two servants. He is blind. He has lost the sight in the remaining eye some months after the fire. He has the use of one hand. He has not left the house except to walk in the wet grass in front of it. He has refused, his old housekeeper tells Jane, to see anyone from his old life. He is not quite drinking. He is not quite not. He is, in the plainest sense, waiting for nothing.

Jane walks up to the house in the evening. She goes into the kitchen. She offers, quietly, to bring him his water that night. The old housekeeper does not recognize her at first, because Jane is now dressed better and her face is a little fuller. Then she does. She stares. She does not know what to do. Jane takes the tray herself.

She carries it into the small sitting room where Rochester is sitting by a small fire with a large shaggy dog at his feet. The dog — old Pilot, who has known her — gets up and leans on her. Rochester, hearing the dog's movement, puts out his one good hand and says: who is there. Give me the water. Jane puts the glass into his hand. She does not speak. He holds the glass. He says, after a moment, in a voice that suggests he thinks he is hallucinating: whose hand is this. He says: this is a human hand. He says: whose fingers. Whose small fingers.

And Jane speaks. She says: it is I. Rochester, still holding her hand, does not move for a long moment, and then puts his face into her palm and weeps. The scene is the one for which the novel has been preparing since the red room.

They marry three days later, very quietly, in the village church. Neither of them wants a ceremony. Rochester — still blind, still one-handed — is worried Jane will regret it. Jane is not worried. She has thought about this for a year on the Yorkshire moors and she has thought about it for the three days' journey. She has come back, not out of pity, not out of debt, but because she has now discovered, by her year of separation, that her life with him is the life she wishes to live.

And Charlotte Brontë gives the most famous last chapter in the English novel. Ten years later, Jane tells us, they are still married. They have a son. Rochester, after two years, has partially recovered the sight in one eye, enough to see his wife's face and the child's hand. St John has gone to India and is there, dying nobly. Jane is, at thirty-one, a woman, a wife, a mother, a cousin, a housekeeper, the plainest heroine in the English novel, who has been — by her own steady refusal of every easy bargain available to her — the first Englishwoman in fiction to say Reader, I married him, and to mean it, not as a social achievement but as the final sentence of a life chosen one refusal at a time.